On the Agile Toolkit blog today there's and interesting article with a slightly misleading title - "How to Earn Money with Open Source?" It talks less about strategies of how to monetize your open source project and more about how other projects are doing it and why a good core team is important.

OpenSource is an amazing phenomena, but how safe open-source projects are? Would commercial project be safer over the community-supported project? Frameworks can't exist without their core team and In this article I look at how different PHP frameworks are supporting their core developers.

He talks briefly about the need for a good, solid group of core developers on a framework (or really any product) to provide a stable foundation if a product was created with it. Four projects are mentioned - Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, Symfony and Agile Toolkit - and why, because of the backing they have from a company and a large group of developers (and contributors) they're not "yet another framework" that'll disappear over time.

Making new frameworks is fun, however, if you share framework with others, be responsible about the support. Make realistic goals and try to have a plan for a next few years. If you are the author, think who will support the community when you decide to move on.